About Me

About Me

[a little bit of information about me and my websites]

Depending on how you arrived at this page, you likely already know a little bit about me. This page will give you a little more information about me and point you to some of my other websites that I have made.

Websites and Blogs

I love Christmas music. Throughout the month of December (and sometimes November), I like to create a playlist of nothing but Christmas music and listen to it as much as possible. I have a fair collection of Christmas music on CD, but sometimes I just want to hear more. In 2006 I decided to utilise the Internet, and the vast amount of music that can be downloaded freely and legally from it. The only problem is that this music is scattered all over the place, and it took hours of searching on my part to track it down. I decided to create a website with links to all of the free, legally available Christmas music that I found so that other people would be able to find it more easily. Please check out Free Christmas Music if you want to find any of this music yourself.

Free Christmas Music (the search engine)

Shortly before I created the Free Christmas Music website, Google rolled out their custom search engine feature. I had toyed around with it a bit but had never managed to make anything useful with it. My Free Christmas Music project, however, seemed like a natural fit for its own search engine; after all, the whole point of it was to reduce the search space for people looking for free Christmas music - why not go the extra step and allow people to search through those sites, in addition to just being able to browse them?

Try searching for your own favourite Christmas songs - you may be pleasantly surprised by what you find!

In 2007, I decided to start a blog to complement the Free Christmas Music website and search engine. My main motivation for doing this was so that I could have an RSS feed, which would enable me to keep people up to date with the latest additions to the website and search engine. I also try to highlight at least one artist, album, or song each week on the blog, offering my own comments on the music as well as links to download the music. The Free Christmas Music blog is now active and gets updated as often as possible during the months of November and December.

I am a father of three beautiful children. My youngest child, born in August 2007, had colic, so it sometimes took a while to settle him to sleep. One thing that helped tremendously was the use of white noise for him to listen to. I thought that it would be easy to find white noise sound files for free on the Internet; unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case, as it seems that most sites are trying to sell white noise CDs, and very few of them have anything substantial to give away.

Free White Noise is a website that I started as a way of trying to get around that problem. Rather than pointing out sites that have white noise sound files to give away, I decided to put up some of my own recordings for people to download. I don't have professional recording equipment; all of my recordings have actually been made on my cell phone. Still, I add new sounds as I make them, and hopefully such a site can be a start to getting more of these soothing, and often unique, sounds freely available on the Internet.

Started in December 2007, after the Free Christmas Music blog showed me how much fun it could be to blog about music, this is the blog I post on most often. I try to get at least one new post up every week, and I only have two criteria for the music I post about: 1. it can be obtained freely and legally, and 2. I like it. Other than those two restrictions, everything is fair game, so you never know what might show up on Totally Free Music.

From September 2007 to January 2009, I worked for a gaming studio, programming casual video games. After being let go (along with about 80% of the rest of the staff... yeah), I decided to keep making video games in my own spare time. Taylored Games is a blog with information about my game programming activities. In September 2009, I released my first game, Picture Puzzle Revolution, as a free download.

About Me

Husband, father, PhD student, video game programmer, music aficionado - these are just a few of the terms I would use to describe myself. Email me at jeff.c.taylor+aboutme@gmail.com if you want to chat about anything, or if you have any suggestions or comments about my websites. You can find me on Facebook (I do limit my Facebook friendships to family and people I have known in some capacity in "real life", so if you don't fall into either of those categories, any friendship requests will most likely just be ignored).